Guns Save Lives is not supported by ads and is ran as an independent project. If you support this project please consider supporting us on Patreon. Registration takes just a moment and even $1 is a massive help in continuing our work. Thank you so much.

A town in Bradford County, PA is currently in an uproar after one of its two police officers was photographed selling an AK variant rifle to a person out of the trunk of his patrol car.

The officer has been suspended and a public meeting was held on Friday, but the city council took no further action at that time.

It seems pretty clear that the officer was operating within the law as PA allows for private party sales between two legal parties without involving a gun dealer.

At issue is whether the officer used the city owned police vehicle while he was on duty to conduct the transaction.

According to WNEP, residents (or at least the ones interviewed by the news) were pretty upset about the whole thing,

“I was shocked, I was shocked. Especially when there’s an automatic weapon involved and the public was exposed,” said Phillip Brewer, the mayor of Laceyville.

“It’s pretty scary knowing that someone in law enforcement could be out selling guns to people,” said Shawn Burns from Lawton.

“For him to do something so foolish, it just boggled my mind,” said Jean Reinhart, the mayor of Wyalusing.

WNEP also incorrectly reported that the rifle was an automatic AK-47. The rifle was almost certainly a semi-automatic AKM variant rifle which is completely legal in PA.

I can understand the town being upset about the officer using city time and resources to conduct a private transaction, but I have to wonder if they would be equally as outraged if the officer was picking up his dry cleaning while in his squad car.

Also, and I certainly don’t want to get anyone into any trouble here, I’ve personally bought a gun from a police officer while he was in uniform in his squad car, but he was on a break at the time. No, it wasn’t from my hometown police department either.